In 1756, the Berens brothers, Riga based traders, tasked a young man of their acquaintance, Johann Georg Hamann, with a mission to London. Born in Konigsberg on the 27th of August 1730, the son of a surgeon, Hamann would receive, amidst the pietist atmosphere of his family, an education of both an indigestible and unordered nature, which according to him would contribute to the development of the discontinuity of his temperament. A “naive curiosity for all forms of heresy”, his knowledge of Hebrew and his taste for exegesis as well as for the problems of language had initially pushed him towards university, but he would later claim that a deficiency of elocution, a deficient memory, many dissimulations and a mental restriction had been large enough obstacles for him not to pursue regular studies in theology. Additionally, a kind of aestheticising dilettantism threatened to scatter him. After this he submitted himself again to an intellectual discipline, doing studies in jurisprudence. Under the pretext of maintaining his material independence, he believed he had to become a tutor, and had done so, both in Livonia and in Courland, amidst misunderstandings and quarrels with the parents of his students. Internally agitated, unsatisfied, unable to support himself and with the habit of making himself into an enigma, such was the state of Hamann when his friends, the Berens, offered him a voyage to London in order to distract him and to get him to return with more consideration and “know-how”(savoir-faire). The voyage is thus presented under the form of a test; he is asked to recover a debt, and it will appear later on how, Hamann being indebted himself, this situation will take on a spiritual significance. Once in London, I was surprised, he writes, by the importance of this debt, furthermore by the envisaged method of recovering it, and perhaps most of all by the choice of the person to whom it had been entrusted. Inapt to take several initiatives in this domain, soon becoming complacent in inaction and dissipation, he quickly found himself at the end of his resources: only the image of a knight errant and the bells of my fool’s cap constitute my good humour and heroic courage.
When called back by the Berens brothers, he returns to Riga, and is a different man; or rather he is the same, no longer vulnerable but armed from head to toe with all the mistakes of the old one: what happened to him? At the height of depression, Hamann in London, suddenly began to reread the Holy Scriptures. He had understood that God had assumed his debts, and that by granting him his grace, had manifested his power in the weakness of the insolvent. This is why, when those who should have been disappointed by his practical incapabilities had welcomed him not only with indulgence but affection upon his return, this indulgence for him would be just as unbearable as the divine mercy had been strengthening. He felt the need to deliver a confession to his protector, to communicate his spiritual experience, but also dared to ask for the hand of the sister of the Berens. As the latter could not help but see his request as an impudent way of drawing the consequences of this justifying grace, and in his conversion saw only a way to make a mockery of his failure in London, a singular quarrel followed. Hamann withdraws, but it's a victorious retreat, because his arguments will have sufficiently reached the susceptibility of his opponents such that they will send parliamentarians after him, one of them being none other than Immanuel Kant. By this confrontation with the “Devil of the metaphysical aurora”, Hamann isled to develop an unusual and personal mode of discussion on the previous questions of existence which will inspire Kierkegaard. Unleashed by an incident both painful and slapstick in his private life, the genius of Hamann takes a free course, both in pamphlets such as Socratic Memorabilia (1759) which will be a singular religious and metaphysical commentary of the preceding quarrel under the form of a portrait of Socrates, and later in the Hellenistic Letters and his Crusade of a philologist which concern questions of exegesis and contain the famous Aesthetica in Nuce (1762), of which the influence was revelatory for the spirits of Herder and Goethe. Or again in The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross: Concerning the Divine and Human Origin of Language raised by his controversy with Herder (1772-1776); in his Metacritique of Pure Reason where he defined his opposition with Kant, and in his Golgotha and Scheblimini where he attacks the humanitarian deism of Mendelssohn in the name of the Hebrew tradition of the Lutheran reformation; and lastly, in his Flying Letter where he epitomises his “Desert Preaching.”
But most of all it is in his vast correspondence with Herder, or with Jacobi on whom he exercises an immediate influence, with Lavater or with his peers, that Hamann’s expression is most accessible, without being less stimulating than in his pamphlets, and here we see best his spirit live: Hamann’s referencing of lived instances to various citations taken from the Scriptures had been pushed to the point of delirious humour. In the aftermath of his father's death, whom he was in the service of after his quarrel with the Berens, he had made a marriage of conscience with the servant of his father's house, providing him with two sons. Kant had procured a position for him as an administrative secretary and secretary-translator for the customs department, of which the mediocre salary couldn’t provide for the upkeep of his home. His material existence seemed desperate, when a young man of fortune, Baron Buchholz of Wellbergen, asked to adopt him as his son, and endowed him with capital destined for the education of his children.
In 1787, Hamann travelled to Westphalia, to Munster to visit his adopted son, and then to Dusseldorf to visit Jacobi; the “Mage of the North” was waited upon and received by a circle of “beautiful souls” presided over by Princess Galitzine. It is striking to see how the career of Hamann finished in such a similar way as it had started: in a dependency that was going to make him yet again intolerant towards the affection and charity of others. We see him at the beginning break this dependence in affirming his great personality. And now that this great personality exercises its authority on others, he doesn’t tolerate any longer that it is understanding others who could provide him the means of exercising it freely. Could it be that it was indispensable to his nature to appear wrong before men in order to feel strengthened and justified by the Lord?
Still, after some time, after having, it seems, sufficiently practised his maieutic towards Jacobi: troubling others in their belief, he abruptly leaves his home for Wellbergen’s to which Jacobi will later say that Hamann had probably paid the benefits that he owed him with his life. He died on the 20th of June 1788 in Munster, where the princess Galitzine buried him in her park.
Whether or not we place with Hegel this amalgam of visionary gifts, simulation, fervent devotion, voluptuousness and egocentricity under the sign of equivocation, the fact remains that these dispositions, so contradictory and surprising in a man who claimed to have found the peace of Christ, enter into activity the moment he recognizes himself as the pardoned murderer of Jesus Christ. It is thus the faith in the grace of the saviour, even the conscience of the justified sinner, that in this young man, previously still scattered and indecisive, brings together all of the misfortunate dispersion and perdition of his person into an active totality.
Undoubtedly, the justified sinner had first of all acquired a prodigious freedom of speech from those on whom he depended, materially that of the Berens, and morally that of Kant. In their eyes, he was perhaps not far from a Tartufe-like figure, since he used his failures to glorify the divine grace which had been manifested in his weakness. But his authority was precisely that of an awareness that they did not have, and that the rationalist and moralist habits of thought prevented them from having. Awareness of his own authenticity was all the stronger as it applied to the scriptural absolutism of the speech2 of God from which he drew a pessimism no less intransigent with regard to their moral illusions. If we asked him to distinguish between divine and human things, he would respond that the Christian does all things in God: eat and drink, leave a city for another, remain there, act and wonder here and there for a year, or even stay there inactive in expectation; all of this constitutes the affairs and works of the divine. Only the justified sinner is conscious of the fact that human acts are unpredictable, because they are all foreseen by God. He knows that to deny divine Providence is for the reasonable man to condemn himself to perpetual self-disavowal. If he were criticised for his exuberant behaviour, he would notably say to Kant that the illness of his passions confer on him a force of feeling and of thought that no sane man could ever possess. It is as such that he has been redeemed. Without a doubt he is mocking Kant, but not God nor posterity when he says to the philosopher from Konigsberg: At this very moment I am a Leviathan, the monarch or the Prime Minister of the ocean, of a breath which the tides depend on. The next moment I see myself as a whale that God has created to frolic in the sea ... each animal, in thought and in the Scriptures, has its proper way of moving. One moves by way of jumps and trajectories, like a grasshopper; the other by successive sequences like a snake on the road, for reasons of protection which necessitate its structure. One goes straight, one goes twistedly. According to Hogarth’s system, the “serpentine” line constitutes the element of all pictorial beauties.
Thus he was capable of going even further in his cynicism and of pushing all accusations to absurdity. It is not the truth of reason that holds him back. Like Socrates, it is sufficient for him to believe all that the other believes to be true and only aim to trouble the other in his belief. Reason was not given to us to be sages, but to recognise our folly and ignorance; exactly like the laws of Moses were given to the Jews to render their sins more criminal. And he will say again in 1786, to Jacobi, that philosophers, like Jews, have not understood that truth and grace must be revealed historically, and cannot be metagrobolised, inherited or acquired. Hamann is the first example of a frankly immoralist apologetic: as soon as Christ is preached, man understands that reason and morality find themselves abolished. What does this mean? I lutherise, Hamann declares to his contemporaries who, because they establish dignity upon the impious exercise of secularised reason, are made papal figures in his eyes. In fact, the impiety of reason is to substitute the authorised revelation of the Word of God for the autonomy of the human consciousness, under the pretext of liberating the human spirit from the dark forces of man. Because these are the forces of sin, reason, by suppressing these dark forces, establishes a false peace of spirit through an equally false notion of duty and responsibility; and since it cannot absolve them, it renders these forces destructive and sterile. Condemned within man by the Word of God, only the Word can give these forces grace and render them creative. For if these forces of flesh and blood are the agents of sin, they are also the organs of Revelation, and it is precisely through the most irrational powers - passion and imagination - that the Spirit of God has communicated itself to mankind, arousing in them mythical and prophetic faculties through which they retain images of the events of Genesis and receive those of the future. These dark forces, which await their manifestation in order to become light, because all that is manifest is light (Ephes. V, 13), are therefore properly the original forces of man. Then, we find that to take the side of these forces against reason and morality, is to reestablish the authority of the Word of God, to vindicate their liberation in the name of the theologia Crucis of the monk of Augsburg is to indicate to the redeemed forces the freedom of play (la liberté du jeu) as the supreme awareness of the gravity of redemption. Surely this is an unforeseeable outcome of the Lutheran pecca fortiter; but if we consider it from the point of view of cultural and religious morphology, it is a synthesis of Lutheran theology and baroque genius; the latter, using eminently sensual forms, creates an equivocal ambiance in the favour of which he claims insinuates the mysteries of faith. And rationalism appears thus as an effort to overcome this. As much as he participates in the Baroque spirit, Hamann develops an apologetic of which the medium is simulacra. Rigorous logic reigns in my mimic style. Also the style of his paradoxical preaching, which plays, tricks and indulges in a thousand misunderstandings, making him take on the mask of his adversary in order to exorcise him. The appearance of evil is preferable to the appearance of good, as long as the world wants to be deceived and must be. To appear worse than one actually is, is to be truly better than one appears, this I consider to be a duty and an art.
Without a doubt the idea of a mimic style still obeys a Pietist method which consists in placing oneself affectively in harmony with the different states of the soul expressed by the saintly Scriptures. But for Hamann this method amounts to relating each of the movements of his soul and mood to a word of Scripture; as in the Gospel the lord does not only speak to those who were already thus present, but to those who currently live and to all men of all centuries, as remarked by Francis Bacon, Hamann finds that the Word of God contains the key to each particular instance and the state of the soul proper to it, because if God borrowed the human pathos to make himself heard by men, every ''pathetic'' state must allow us too to penetrate the meaning of the Word of God. This is why passions bring us to appropriate the most general instances via personal application and allow us to bring forth each instance which is properly ours so that it can become a public theatre of heaven and earth. Therefore, the exegete can only interpret the Word of the Author of the Six Days faithfully by assimilating the feelings that presided over the creation of this world and its redemption, just as a work is interpreted according to the feelings that agitated its author at the time of its composition. Creation is not the work of vanity, but of abasement. The Six words had such a bitter taste in the mouth of this great genius that it took him six days to accomplish his creation, and a seventh day to rest. But as for the ambiguity and obscurity that are the nature of this mimic style, we could, with Hegel, see it as a subjectivity irreducibly hostile to reflection; but it would be better to see in it, as Goethe clearly understood, the inner necessity to actualise in language what reason and science dissociate, because in reality, there is only one Word, a single Creation proffered by this single Word. What wonder, then, that after denouncing as sacrilegious the attempt of "enlightenment" philosophy to make reason independent of all tradition and faith, Hamann mocked the "idol of pure reason" and Kant's claim that he wanted to "separate reason from sensible experience and its common everyday induction", in order to "purify language" even of its sensible elements through reason.
Hamann saw in the images of popular language "the hypostatic union of the natures of sensibility and understanding, the communication of the idioms of their forces"; so it is through the sacrament of language that the transubstantiation of experience into image, into experience of the spirit, takes place; Jacob's ladder on which armies of images assault the fortress of understanding, and from which armies of concepts descend into the deep abyss of sensible life. Hamann's resulting ambiguity of expression undoubtedly did greater justice to the principle of the coincidence of opposites, capable of resolving the disputes of sound reason and pure unreason. For no philosophy can separate what God has joined together. But it is precisely in the union of things that seem destined to exclude, abolish, contradict and annihilate one another that the mystery of divine wisdom persists... A work greater than creation out of nothing. No one but God can create evil and uphold it; to create darkness and use it to form light.